Glass artist Michele Mitcavish was born and raised in Michigan. After receiving her BFA degree in oil painting at Grand Valley State University, Michele spent two summers landscape painting in the south of France. Upon completing her degree, she relocated to upstate New York, where she taught landscape painting and drawing in the community. Moving back to Michigan, she started a five year relationship with a local glass company and became enamored with glass, learning multiple techniques and teaching classes to the public.
After one more move to the San Francisco Bay Area, Michele worked for an architectural glass company, assisting in transcribing art into glass and fabricating. She now works in her own studio in Napa, working on multiple fine art pieces and teaching her methods of multiple discipline glass techniques to students.
Limiting yourself to one methodology does not utilize the incredible versatility of glass as an artistic medium. Michele takes a holistic approach to her work, learning many methods -- sandblasting, painting, fusing and casting -- and then mixing them into complete finished pieces. This blending and fusing of art mediums has been her passion for the past 15 years.
Nature and its wonders have always been a key ingredient to her work. However, it is her emotional side that has always dictated the colors and the fluidity of the brush stroke she uses. The nature of glass makes it a bit harder to express one's self as fluidly as some other mediums. It is for this reason that Michele expresses her ideas in paint before transcribing them into glass.
